Katana releases.

New Network Materials UX

Katana 3.2 brings a totally revamped material node graph system inside the Network Material Create Node, providing elegant organization for artists and teams. Shading nodes now have a new artist-focused design with a fully exposed, left-to-right workflow. It’s far easier to see everything, with all possible outputs at your fingertips, and different views are available, allowing you to expand or decrease the level of detail displayed at any one time. New Shading Group nodes allow for the clean organization of a complex network: put together a series of shading nodes and the Shading Group effectively becomes its own self-contained widget, which can be connected and applied to multiple nodes.

3Delight NSI 1.5

3Delight NSI in Katana 3.2 has seen a number of exciting updates. SSS in 3Delight NSI has been improved to use the Random Walk method delivering incredible results. A powerful new workflow allows artists to render from multiple cameras at the same time in a few clicks. For artists engaged in look development of an environment, being able to judge choices from all important camera angles at the same time is a game changer. Also, displacement maps can be used with the Principled shader directly, saving time. Hair and fur shader improvements result in excellent aesthetics. The 3Delight rendering plug-in is now multithreaded by default, with scene export times improved between 30% to 400%, and instance and VDB Volume rendering memory footprints improved by as much as 8x.

Viewer Upgraded to USD 19.05

As part of our ongoing commitment to USD, we’ve upgraded the underlying technology used for our Hydra-powered viewport. Katana’s use of Hydra has been updated to USD 19.05, introducing the ability to use the render delegate system in their pipeline.

Modern Viewport

We’ve updated the Hydra-powered viewport to make it even more artist-friendly. A number of UX improvements have been made which reduce the need for artists to work between the two viewport technologies in Katana, facilitating faster and more efficient workflows.

Integrated Powerful Rendering

Katana 3.1 includes 3DelightNSI - the next generation of the 3Delight production renderer. The latest and greatest version of this superfast renderer, 3DelightNSI introduces a new Principled Shader, automatic texture map conversion to mipmaps, super fast multi-sampled volume rendering, a new AOV based on the recent Pre-Lit Materials paper of Siggraph 2018, and network caching, amongst other features.

Increased Artist Productivity

The performance of scene processing in Katana has been greatly improved, with the ability for multi-threaded render plugins to drastically reduce time to first pixel. This improved performance allows artists to wait less time and make more changes, providing the best possible workflow.

Pipeline Power

Building pipeline tools, interop between Foundry tools, and general technical capacity has been unified as we’ve updated the core building blocks of Katana to match what’s outlined in the VFX Reference Platform 2017 specification, including moving to the Qt5 UI library.

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